 No one likes to have things stolen from him or her or to be lied to. However, these seemingly petty but heinous crimes are committed in the university classroom on a semester basis. Better known and punished as plagiarism in the United States, this abuse has seen a steady increase in Ukraine with students having better access to faster computers and downloading papers even quicker off the Internet.
As a "seasoned" (please read "jaded") teacher in both American and Ukrainian settings, I understand that it might just be a desperate attempt used by young students who are not confident with their writing skills. This is never truer than in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) setting where the students' former Ukrainian high school teachers may have turned a blind eye when such papers were handed in. This American composition teacher has some theories about why the practice of stealing words is so prevalent in Ukraine and ideas on how to eradicate plagiarism in the future.
First, as a long-suffering teacher I have seen many students from different nationalities plagiarize, it is not just a problem in Ukraine's educational system. The original Latin term of plagiarius means "kidnapper" and students from Asian cultures are just as guilty of kidnapping or stealing others' words as in any country in the former Soviet Union. I believe the "monkey see, monkey do" mentality should be banned from the top down. Only then would students realize the importance of using their own words instead of pirating others. This might start by strictly enforcing copyright infringement in regard of the free downloading of CD music or movies. But worse, I have attended academic conferences where Ukrainian professors take academic papers written in English and claim them as their own research.
Second, such peer pressure is unfortunately expected for college-aged students but the "everybody is doing it" approach is not a credible excuse to pass off others' words as one's own. That lie has to be annihilated along with believing that the Orthodox religion creates non-thinking writers. China has been under a communist system since 1949 with no organized religion mandating non-thinking subservience. The Chinese students I have taught, as practicing communists, are very adept at copying word for word without giving credit to the original author. Practicing Muslim-Arabic speakers who try to write papers in English are used to "borrowing" from others' writings. Their excuse is that Arabic speakers come from an oral tradition and so are not accustomed to written traditions as other nationalities are.
Therefore, I have a pet theory when considering why Ukrainian students cheat with plagiarized papers. I believe the former communist system still holds a long shadow over Ukraine's higher education today. In days when dictatorial commands on education were handed down from Moscow, the authority figure was often thwarted. Garden-variety people were not rewarded for having original thoughts, in fact, quite the contrary. If someone stepped outside of parroting the communist party line, in some cases they were sent off to the gulag or worse yet, exterminated.
A prime example of wholesale plagiarism occurred when Alexander Volkov took credit for L. Frank Baum's fictional account of the "Wizard of Oz" and changed the name to "Wizard of Emerald City." First published in 1939, according to Wikipedia, it is a "loose translation of the first Oz book, with names changed and chapters added or omitted." A "loose translation" really should read that L. Frank Baum's book was actually "stolen intellectual property." That is one of many examples of how the educational authorities of the former Soviet Union took material and claimed it as its own. How can this incestuous habit of "kidnapping" children's' stories be broken from above and expected to change at the university classroom level below years after communist rule?
I believe today's Ukrainian students are living in a post-genocidal society, a term coined by the late James Mace, expert researcher on the Holodomor (Terror Famine of 1932-33). I theorize that students are trying to survive academia by "beating the system" and purposely go against any authority figure like myself, who warn them to not steal words that are not their own. In my own research about the Holodomor, where an estimated 10 million people died of starvation in 1932-33, one of my interviewees, Luba, told me something that relates to education. Luba said one needed to be "smart" in order to survive:
My father was kind of smart, they took his passport from him and without a passport you cannot live in the Sovietka. So in my father's [internal passport], they put the stamp: "Passport is not valid anymore." My father ripped out that page and he made a stamp from a potato, put it in a sink, carved the stamp into potato and with red ink he created another new stamp in his old passport. And then when they were inspecting his passport, they would just look, "Oh, okay, go on." It saved him. You have to be smart.
Also, I believe there might be a holdover in the Ukrainian mentality about the collective where it is "one for all and all for one." The cohort way of thinking continues to reign supreme where individual accomplishment and achievement seems to be shunned.
The following suggestions are how I hoped to eradicate this problem in my university classroom. This may help instructors in other disciplines as well. In a class I taught this spring semester I had one student out of 60 who wrote a stellar paper on Ukraine's Prince Vladimir. Julia sat in the very front row, not wanting to miss anything. If I were to simply grade by where the students sat in the classroom, the farther back the desks, the lower the grades were for my students' final product.
Technically, some guys in the very last rows dressed in black leather jackets with a fixation for cell phone text messaging deserved a grade of G or H if grades were allowed to go that low.
I had warned my students from the very beginning, based on what was on my three-page syllabus, that they should not even try to plagiarize their final research project. I told them several times that I could tell a plagiarized paper a mile away
(alas, perhaps I should have used the measurement of "kilometer" for better comprehension). I had tried to instill in them a sense of duty to start their research early and I referred them to Purdue University's award winning website called Online Writing Lab (OWL.com). I exhorted my students to eschew any citations with so-called "facts" from Wikipedia, Encarta, and Encyclopedia Britannica. I told them I was available to help at the Ukrainian Educational Center across the street from KPI (Kyiv Polytechnic Institute). Some listened and obeyed, many did not.
Half the papers were picked off the Internet and how could I tell? The words were too big and the grammar too perfect. As promised, the consequences were "F" grades for those perfect "stolen" papers. I gave grace to about 20 students who had done passable work on their homework assignments and quizzes. They were required to read through Julia's flawless paper and compare it to their own. Then they were to write an essay telling me about the differences they saw. Out of this exercise, I got the following confession from a contrite student:
After I found that my final paper was really awful because of plagiarism, my teacher gave me a chance to rewrite it...First of all, I realized my biggest mistake consisted of plagiarism and lying. In my past, at the Ukrainian schools, it was normal to use detailed information from the Internet. Moreover, it was the first research paper in my life and I had no experience. At first, I didn't understand at all how to do it and I hesitated to ask for assistance. Thus, I decided to use the Internet. Moreover, I used other people's words without giving credit to them.
After comparing Julia's work and my own, I found a couple of other mistakes. Among them were not enough sources, works cited were not in MLA format and there was an absence of in-text references. In Julia's paper you will find more than six in text references and quotes. One more thing that makes her work really excellent is that it is very original as she used her own words. Also, it is clear and understandable because she used the right format and she highlighted all important information and titles.
However, I feel happy that I have a chance to improve my grade. It is a big lesson for me and I will never ever do it again. I will keep Julia's paper in order to have a good example of research work, because I'm sure that in the future I will have many works of this type...What's more, for the first time in my life, I was working in an academic manner, going to the library, analyzing information and extracting the essential.
In conclusion, this class allowed me to understand some valuable lessons. First of all, I understood the harm of plagiarism. Secondly, I learned how to write research papers. Thirdly, I found a lot of interesting information for myself about the person I was researching.
Finally, the feedback I got from my students' evaluations prove to me the Ukrainian educational system has a long way to go in order to understand the differences the students perceive from the Ukrainian way of writing. A student wrote: "The American way of writing shows more perspective and ideas to complete such a paper, where in Ukraine most students cut and paste or copy, which lacks the ability to produce better papers."
Yes, writing teachers around the world are very busy people and grading compositions seems a thankless job when correcting grammar or other grievous errors of herd thinking. However, the worst writing blunder made is to plunder others' writings without giving due credit. Some Ukrainian parents who are paying dearly in tuition at our western styled university actually want their children to learn proper writing skills and not how to steal. Therefore, educators are weighted down with the responsibility of teaching Ukraine's future, one hopefully free of stealing and lying.
Kristina Gray teaches at Wisconsin International University-Ukraine (WIUU), Kyiv.
|
